“That is another thing I had to tell you about . . . and I am glad that it is you who bring up this point, in case you start feeling that this is a one-sided conversation this Sarduh morning; or that you might find yourself thinking, after I finish talking to you, and you sit down to digest my words, I say I am glad you is the author o’ that sentiment and not me, although many’s the time I myself sit down in this plush palace I works in, and the poorness and poverty of my situation comes to me in leaps and bounds, and sometimes I have to open my mouth wide-wide in amazement at the narrow-mindedness that I finds myself with, at times. I am cooped up here, in a palace, working as a domestic, and within these four walls, Clemmie, darling, I have build four more bigger, higher, and thicker walls, to protect me from what the four walls of this palace mean to me, in terms o’ myself. I won’t deafen your ears concerning the material things I have accumulated through my stewardship for this lady. I won’t do that to you. For me and you, both o’ we is two women who find weselves in a position o’ possessing things and owning things that wasn’ in our lives back home. You down there, in Jamaica . . . Did yuh hear recently that Shearer, the prime minister, get his arse cut in the elections? Good! . . . and I, in Barbados. We are the owners and possessors o’ first-class material things. But things that have to do with a person—or with a person’s spirit!—we is only part owners o’ that . . .
“But the point you just bring up . . . and this going have to be my last point with you this morning ’pon the tellyphone, ’cause I am still a employed person. But the point: emigrading! Emigrading-back to the West Indies from here! Emigrading-back. And we have to emigrade-back becausin we neither have the means nor the wherewithal to be treated as tourisses here in Canada. Once I used to go ’round Toronto pretending I was a touriss: that I come up for a short visit, to see the snow and the new city hall, watching the subway and the tall-tall apartment buildings going up in the sky, whiching, as we have discuss over and over again, is really all that Toronto have to offer; but as you know, I couldn’ pretend for too long that I was a touriss. For one thing, Canada don’t have no touriss board down in Barbados, nor in the rest o’ the West Indies—to my knowledge—to encourage Wessindian people to come up here for the winter to ski or the summer, to fish . . .
“But you looking at it that way, Clemmie? You ever see it in that fashion? Why is it that Barbados does have to send big able Barbadian men with all kinds o’ degrees and certificates up here just to invite a few Canadians to go down there to my country, to buy it out, and lick it up, and give the place a bad name as a resort . . . Jesus Christ! Barbados is not well-known for our literacy rate, which is the highest, the very highest in the world! Nor for the fact that Barbadians know as much Latin and Greek as any Roman from the days o’ Caesar and Nero! Not for that! But as a resort! A resort, Clemmie, is nothing but a closet, a water closet, a WC . . . they does call it a restroom up here in Canada! The biggest enemy, and the most anti-Barbadian Bajan-man I have hear about in this world, is that bastard down there in Bridgetown, by the name o’ Henry Shideaway! I can’t understand why the government back home allow he to do that kind o’ unfairness to young Wessindian women, by selling them at such a tender age, to all kinds and forms o’ tourisses, just because the tourisses is Northamericans with money. Is that what money mean? And to get back to the point: you never-never-never see a touriss place open by the Canadians down there in the islands, asking Wessindians to come up here and walk in the snow, and take up a handful o’ snow in their hand, and feel the snow, which, if I understand something I see once on the CBC television, is a way of learning a person’s culture, in the same way that I watch with my own two eyes, that foreigner-woman down on that beach at Paradise Hotel in Barbados, how she could take-up a handful o’ sand in her hands, and by that act, transform both herself and the sand and the place and the time where she was stanning-up, and I had a blasted difficult time remembering that I was looking at a Canadian woman and not at a native-born Barbadian-woman. At that Holiday Inn place, last night, Clemmie, darling, it was that brand o’ emigrading-back in my mind that caused me, in the midst o’ my presence there, dress-off in my Mistress maxi suede coat, standing in the middle of all them people, alone and by myself and seeing a bunch o’ foreign people take over possession o’ my island—even from this distance and through a slide in Technicolor, lock, stock, and flying fish.
“And a next thing happen. Child, I must tell you ’bout this. Outta all the fellows they bring up to sponsor and organize this big-big bonanza 1972 in Toronto, out of all o’ them highly educated and successful men and women, Barbadians bred-and-born like me, Bajans who I remember, either from going to school with, or else remember through word o’ mouth, walking ’bout Barbados and Bridgetown barefoot, with their backside at the door, naked, those ladies and gentlemen were too proud to pick their teet’ to me, or to anybody like me, ’cause they was only businessing with the Canadians and anybody who could rent a room in their guest house . . . Outta all o’ them the only Barbadian who thought enough of me to exchange two words with me, was one big tall light-skin man, by the name o’ Worms, a gentleman, who, iffen he ain’ really white in a Canadian sense o’ shade and colour, could easily pass for one o’ them up here—if he choose to—well, this gentleman stand up behind me. Before he speak to me, I don’t know him from Adam. He didn’t see my face yet. At least not before he speak to me. He just understand that I am a lady, somebody, who musta been somebody since I was there amongst them invited guesses. And when his voice hit my ears, I make a spin-around, pleased as hell, to at last get a greeting from one o’ my own-own countrymen, and when I see the colour o’ the face and the size o’ the man that went ’long with the voice and the accent, I had was to hold on ’pon both his hands, and in my heart, I say to him, ‘Thank you, thank you, Mr. Worms, for at least mekking me feel like a person, a lady.’ He said to me, ‘Miss? How are you enjoying yourself? Let me get you a rum and soda, ’cause I know you’s a Bajan, like me. And I is just as lonely in the midst o’ all these Canadian people as you, never mind I almost got the same colour as them . . . So look, man, come, let the two o’ we Bajans get drunk as shite offa this freeness.’
“Clemmie, when Mr. Worms say that to me, water from my eye dropped into the glass with the rum and soda in it . . . just to think o’ that, just to think . . . just to think . . .”
LETTER OF THE
LAW OF BLACK
“Edgehill House”
Edgehill Lane
Edgehill Tenantry
BARBADOS
I am writing this letter to you now, at this rather late time, because when you left the island to go away to Toronto, there was too much emotion in the air, and talk was impossible and talking did not make sense. Most of the things that was said was what I call emotion; all that emotion was good for someone as young as you, taking up a journey in life, to another country which is strange to you, although you may forget that you were born there.
The emotion itself was not complete though, was not real emotion, and it rang a bit empty to me, because I am too old for emotion and passion, and because the one person who could have made the rafters ring for joy, that you, her only child, was going to a place where she had so many happy years, and tragic years, was not there. Then, was not the time. Then, was not the occasion to bring back memories whose only meaning and point in bringing them up, would have demanded the bringing up also of the tragedy which define those memories. Your mother.
I waited all these years also, because I wanted to be sure and certain that you got through your first year in Toronto. They tell me, and I am referring to the lawyer-fellow and the vicar who live beside me, that the first year of studying the things you are studying, is the most hardest of the four years proscribed for studying. The first year is the hardest and saddest. That is what the lawyer-fellow say. The vicar say that being in the first year, you are free from whatever spiritual responsibilities that being at home here assumes you should carry with you; and that
you are alone in a new kind of freedom, and that very often you will need somebody with experience and affection, to help you confine yourself within that very freedom. It was the vicar, I think, who used the words “inner spiritualism,” to make the point that I now making to you, using a summary of his words as I do so. To me, it is a more simple thing. I call it knowing and understanding what freedom really stand for.
And if I remember correctly from my own days in that country while I was on a two-year farm labourers’ scheme working on farms in southern Ontario—Chatham and London and Windsor—before I forgot to report to the liaison-man in charge of checking the conditions of the farm labourers, and took a leave without leave, as you may say, and lost myself in Toronto until they tracked me down, and deported me, a man with my education at the best school in Barbados, and with all my years in the Civil Service here, things which you already know, and before they hounded me down like a dog—as it was their duty to do, the liaison-man said—and send me back here, but not before I had amass thousands of dollars for your maintenance and upkeep, I call to mind that the first year in that country, as in another country where you are a stranger, demands your complete attention to details which later turn out to be a damn complete waste of time.
You have to watch your allowance. And the allowance that the government people and the man in charge of the farm labourers used to give, was not nothing you could write home about. You have to watch your allowance, as if you are a banker or an economist. Or as if you are an investor. And the worse thing that happens, is that you bound to become, and does, a hoarder and a miser. God help you son, that you do not follow in my footsteps, as a stranger in that land, and have to be a hoarder.
For instance, being the son from my loins, you are bound to love clothes and women, not necessarily in that order. But as to clothes, you may see a shirt in a store for ten dollars, and you buy it because you think it is a saving. And the next day, you will pass another shop window and see the same shirt, on sale for half the price. And being new to Canada, you do not know, and would never think that you could take the ten-dollar shirt off your back, wrap it in a nice cellophane parcel, and return it to the store, and sneak it on the shelf and get your money back. Canadians do it every day. The Canadians taught me never throw away a receipt, even a receipt for a French letter, if you see what I mean! So, never throw away a receipt from a store, not even a liquor store.
You could tell me if Stollery’s Emporium for Men still is at the intersection of Bloor and Yonge streets? I spent many dollars and more hours talking to the manager, and getting wrong advice, but the proper fit from the male clerks. Their shirts are not bad. But the best ones I wore, and still have some of, after fifteen years, were obtain at the annual Jewish Hadassah sale of clothes in the Canadian National Exhibition, or at the second-hand establishment named the Royal Ex-Toggery, near the Anglo-Saxon residential district of Rosedale on Merton Street. So, you see, I took the best. The best of the second-hand, from the best of both Toronto worlds, the two founding races, at the time. The Anglo-Saxons and the Jews. I am talking about the Fifties. Now, as I have been reading from the clippings you been sending down, and from chatting with the odd tourist on the beach, the place is a virtual potpourri of nationalities, saddle with something called a new sense of ethnic and of nation, namely multiculturalism.
The Jewish man dresses well and elegantly. It is small wonder that Hitler stole his clothes. The Jewish man who dresses, and I knew a few in my time for whom I worked illegally in their homes and in their habadasheries, dresses in good clothes. You can learn something, this and more, from the Jewish gentleman. It is not fit for me, your father, from this distance, to utter to you, what you can learn from the Jewish woman. Our own Hitler is here, wagging his tail, brushing out his fleas against my foot as I write this letter to you. Perhaps I had said the name Hitler out loud as I wrote it, and he thought I was commending him for his companionship, and for guarding the old place and protecting me from the varmints we have down here as Barbadians, now that you are away. If he could talk, and had the uses of language, Hitler would say hello to you, although if he did have that blessing of speech, years ago he would have blasted you in condemnation for your unmerciful treatment of him, and for your insistence that he lived nothing but a dog’s life. “Dogs amongst doctors,” I used to overhear you saying to him; and then Hitler would give out a yelp, as if trying, in his own way, to inform me that you had kicked that precept into him. A dog’s life, indeed. How empty; and still how full. He is lapping up water from the blue enamel bowl in the kitchen, as I sit at the kitchen table, with the door open, writing you this letter. The pullets have multiplied. The cocks crow and screw from sunrise to sunset. And still, I cannot find a blasted egg laid by these thirty-something hens that the two fowl-cocks master, for the thieving neighbour on my right, and the light-fingered bastard on my left. But God do not like ugly.
Nothing here has changed. I went into your room the other day and dusted the cobwebs and the dried skeletons of scorpions and bugs from off your books. The sea air and the salt in the wind are the censors of books in this island. No wonder that people in these hot, tropical countries eat up the television programs from North America, in preferences to putting their faces inside the pages of a book, and so, as a result, in consequence do not know their head from their backside. The book, my son, is moth-eaten, just as the morality of politics in this country is eaten out. Decaying. And Mannigheim, our leader, is the biggest, fattest, and most bothersome moth to fly around the eyes, and sometimes, to get into your mouth. He behaves like a moth, acts like a stinging bee.
I happened to notice the titles of your small but well-chosen library of books. I was pleased to see that although you have read the classics at Harrison College, you still had time besides all that Latin and Greek, two of the deadliest languages I can think of, to read some good literature. You should, while you are there, and during term breaks and March breaks, look at the Russians, especially Pushkin, the vicar say. You know, he was one of us! I nearly dropped dead when the lawyer-fellow told me so. He went to school in Amurca, and studied all this black thing that people about here are now talking about. If you had stuck me with a pin, not one blasted drop of red blood would have oozed from my stunned body. Pushkin is one of us. By that, I mean, a colonial man, more than I mean the obvious, namely that he was a black or coloured man. Even in your position of being in a minority, or as I read in the clippings you send down, a member of a visible minority—as if you could ever be invisible!—being in a minority through color, in a country like Canada, whose immigration policy was pearly white officially, up until 1950, and you can ask Don Moore if he’s still living, the fact of being a coloured colonial; you young intellectuals would say “post-colonial,” or “neo-colonial,” but I am old, and old-fashioned, and the only university I went to was the University of Hard Knocks, and so I say colonial. The colonial is the fact that transcends blackness. Blackness may change when you are amongst all black students; or it may change when you are in the company of good white people. (Have you had the chance to look up Mr. Avrom Lampert yet, as I have asked you, and pay him my respects? He was extremely kind to me; and most helpful in renting me a basement. It was damp, but that was all right. Things used to crawl on the walls. I have eaten more bagels and latkees—do you spell it so?—in his home during my time in the City of Toronto, hiding from the Immigration and Farm Workers’ liaison-men, than I have eaten flying fish and peas and rice. I hope he is still in the flesh. I still owe him the fifty dollars he lent me, thirty years ago, to pay a bill. Shirts, I think. And you know, I lost the receipt! However, if you see him, do not mention the fifty dollars. Time heals all debts.)
You should browse through some Russian literature. In addition to Pushkin, I would think that Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment would be worthwhile, as the vicar tell me. One winter, when I was flat on my back with fever, indisposed through health and threatened with dismissal from my job of being a janitor, and laid u
p in a small attic room on College Street near where the Main Public Library used to be, where I took out and read Crime and Punishment in two days of delirium and high temperatures, thinking it was a detective story, I got worse. They rushed me in an ambulance, with the sirens blaring, to the Toronto General Hospital. They meaning the two Canadian students who rented rooms next to me that summer, and another Canadian who used to put me on my guard Immigrationwise. Dr. Guild, the physician who saw me in the Casualty, what they call the Emergency up there, just smiled and told me to get a bottle of Gordon’s Dry Gin. I had told him of Crime and Punishment. I hope you would not have that kind of relapse when you seek to broaden your literary horizons. If you were to read Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto, as the lawyer-fellow say, even though you are reading it for your degree in Economics and Political Science, if you read it outside your course, they will say you are a communist. You should, if you read those two ideologies, be careful enough to hide their tolerance under your academic gown. Or hide their colour under brown wrappers. But if you are seen on a streetcar or in the subway reading Pushkin or Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy, they will say you are an intellectual. Even if they call you a colonial intellectual, as they have a habit of doing, such as black writer, or black artist, or black doctor, it would be different. You would, by this intelligence, be more dangerous to them, and they would not be able to despise, or worse still, ignore your presence, and call you a visible minority.
The Austin Clarke Library Page 77